DE VERE is putting its nine golf resorts up for sale including the award-winning Cameron House Hotel on the banks of Loch Lomond.
It is understood the hotel and health club operator is selling off two businesses including De Vere Golf to offset its £1.1 billion debt with the taxpayer-back Lloyds Banking Group.
Private equity firms including America's KSL Capital Partners, are believed to be interested in the portfolio which is expected to fetch about £160 million.
Slaley Hall in Northumberland, Dunston Hall near Ipswich, Mottram Hall in Cheshire, Belton Woods in Lancashire and Oulton Hall near Leeds are included in the sale.
The five-star Cameron House, which comprises a golf club, spa and a Michelin-starred Martin Wishart restaurant, was once a regular haunt for the Scottish national football side, and has played host to many celebrity weddings. It is tipped to fetch as much as £65m.
KSL Capital Partners, the US private equity firm that bought The Belfry, near Birmingham, and gave De Vere the contract to manage it, is seen as a likely bidder for Cameron House and its other golf venues.
De Vere chief executive Andrew Coppel said in December: "It was agreed with Lloyds in December 2011, soon after I joined De Vere, that we would work toward crystallising the value of the business over a three to four-year period."
In March, Starwood Capital Group bought its conference centre division, De Vere Venues, for £231m.
De Vere went into the hands of Lloyds Banking Group during the financial crisis in a £650m debt-for-equity deal.
De Vere, created from the old Greenalls brewing empire, was part of a portfolio of loans and investments put together by Peter Cummings, the former head of corporate lending at HBOS, which Lloyds bought at the height of the banking crisis.
Lloyds, had already written off £650m of the original £1.7bn loan in a debt-for-equity swap in 2010.
As part of the 2010 debt-for-equity swap, Lloyds brought in Mr Coppel, the former Queens Moat Houses chief executive, to help to stabilise De Vere's position.
De Vere Hotels, estimated to be worth £180m to £190m, was by December, last year, whittled down to nine properties with the sale of a small number of hotels that did not have golf courses.
The Grand in Brighton, the last of the non-golf sites, which was put up for sale separately for more than £50m, was sold earlier this month to a private investor.
The bombing of the hotel by the IRA during the Conservative Party conference in 1984 killed five people and injured 31 others.
The then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her cabinet were its targets.
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